Trophic transfer of fatty acids in marine food webs

我的团队的研究兴趣集中在使用脂类和脂肪酸(FA)作为工具来研究海洋环境中的碳流和食物网动态。FA非常适合这样的研究，因为许多膳食FA被并入消费者体内，只需对结构进行微小的修改，使FA成为其来源的指示物或生物标记物。在这里，我们建议继续我们正在进行的工作，通过检查FA的营养转移效率来研究FA从猎物向低营养水平的捕食者的转移。这是相对于捕食者食物中可获得的量，在捕食者组织中沉积的FA的量的测量，我们相信这些会随着消费者、FA的浓度和FA结构的不同而不同。一些脂肪酸，如长链omega-3脂肪酸，是所有生物体生长和生存所必需的营养物质。在海洋食物网中，这些必需脂肪酸中的大多数仅由浮游植物合成；因此，了解这些营养物质从食物转移到消费者的效率尤为重要。营养转移效率也可以结合到我们正在开发的方法中，通过比较捕食者和猎物的FA模式或特征来估计消费者的饮食。它们在这一应用中很重要，因为它们允许我们补偿由捕食者的分解代谢和其他过程造成的饮食FA谱的变化。

The research interests of my group are focused on the use of lipids and fatty acids (FA) as tools to study carbon flow and food web dynamics in the marine environment. FA are well suited to such studies because many dietary FA are incorporated into consumers with only minor modifications to structure, making FA useful as indicators or biomarkers of their source. Here, we propose to continue our ongoing work investigating the transfer of FA from prey to predators at low trophic levels by examining trophic transfer efficiencies of FA. This is a measure of the amount of FA deposited in a predator’s tissue relative to the amount available in its diet, and we believe these will vary with consumer, concentration of FA and FA structure. Several FA, such as long chain omega-3 FA, are essential nutrients, required for growth and survival by all organisms. In the marine food web, the majority of these essential FA are synthesized only by phytoplankton; thus, it is particularly important to understand the efficiency with which such nutrients are transferred from diet to consumer. Trophic transfer efficiencies can also be incorporated into methods we are developing to estimate consumer diets by comparison of FA patterns, or profiles, in predator and prey. They are important in that application because they allow us to compensate for changes made to the diet FA profile by catabolism and other processes in the predator.